1967: Israel's six-day victory

12:00AM BST 01 May 2002

In April 1967, an Israeli tractor attempted to work a disputed field, drawing Syrian artillery fire on Kibbutz Gadot. The Syrian positions were out of range of Israel's tanks, and the air force was called into action.

Israel shot down six Syrian aircraft which had been scrambled to challenge them and pursued their prey all the way to Damascus. The countdown to the Six Day War had begun, although Israeli planners may not have known it. Egypt, the most powerful Arab country, was embroiled in the civil war in Yemen, and Israel assumed the Syrians would not move without Egyptian support.

Tensions on the northern border, raised by Israel's use of demilitarised zones, were heightened further by the confrontation over the division of the waters of the River Jordan between Israel, Syria and Jordan. From the early 1960s, Israel began building its National Water Carrier to bring water from the Sea of Galilee to the southern parts of the country.

In response, Syria started work on canals to divert the sources of the Jordan. Israel's attempts to knock out Syrian equipment often escalated into mini-battles involving tanks, artillery and aircraft.

The exact sequence of events that led to war may never be known. Martin Van Creveld, the military historian, argues in The Sabre and the Olive that many senior officers in the IDF were spoiling for a fight and wanted to provoke the increasingly radical Syrian government into war. On the Arab side, an unspoken reason for Nasser's ill-conceived rush to war may have been a desire to stop Israel from completing the development of nuclear weapons, either by intimidation or by war.

In the first half of May, the Soviet Union fed intelligence reports of an Israeli build-up along the Syrian frontier. Nasser, despite Israeli denials, disengaged from Yemen and ostentatiously poured troops into Sinai. Egypt ordered UN troops out of Sinai and its forces re-occupied Sharm el-Sheikh. The blockade on the Straits of Tiran, which Israel had declared in 1957 would be a casus belli, was re-imposed.

At the end of May, Jordan signed a mutual defence pact with Egypt. Iraq joined a few days later. Arab leaders proclaimed that they would re-conquer Palestine once and for all.

On June 3, President Charles de Gaulle overturned France's pro-Israeli policy and announced the suspension of further arms shipments. As Israeli politicians tried to find a diplomatic solution, the generals demanded that Israel take immediate action to prevent the Egyptians from building up their forces.

In an atmosphere of popular fear of a renewed Holocaust, graves were dug in Israeli public parks in anticipation of massive casualties.

Giving up on international action to open the Straits of Tiran, Israel was determined to land the first blow. H-hour was set for 0745 on June 5. Israeli aircraft had earlier taken off in staggered formation over the Mediterranean, and struck simultaneously at nine Egyptian air bases just as the pre-dawn patrols had landed for their morning breaks.

Acting on excellent intelligence, Israel destroyed nearly 300 aircraft in the next three hours. Three-quarters of the Egyptian air force had been left smouldering and by 1100 hours Israeli commanders believed the war had been won.

The Israeli air force was free to wreak similar damage to the Jordanian and Syrian air forces, which had joined the hostilities. With air superiority assured, the task on the ground was made easier.

The Gaza Strip and the fortress-like defences guarding the access routes to the northern Sinai were captured by the second day.

Jordan ignored Israel's appeals to stay out of the war - King Hussein later admitted that he had been misled by Egyptian propaganda claims to be winning a stunning victory - and Israeli paratroopers triumphantly entered the Old City of Jerusalem through the Lion's Gate on the third day of the war.

The rest of the West Bank had fallen by nightfall. On the fourth day of the war, the Israelis reached the Suez Canal. On the fifth day Moshe Dayan, the Israeli defence minister, ordered a last assault on the Golan Heights. The Syrians initially put up stiff resistance, but by the next day the Israelis had taken Kuneitra as the Syrians redeployed their troops northwards to defend Damascus.

It was Israel's greatest triumph. Israel had conquered an area more than three times larger than its own territory.

But the conquest of territory was a poisoned chalice. Israel had become a mini-empire, occupying a sullen and resentful Palestinian population in the West Bank.

The victory set in motion Israel's religious-nationalist settler movement. Its leaders held a Passover dinner in Hebron in 1968 and have never left since in a campaign to speed up the settlement of the captured lands. The humiliation of the Arab states energised Palestinian militants.

On the first day of the Six Day War, Dayan had told the nation on radio: "Soldiers of Israel, we have no aims of conquest." In the aftermath of victory, however, the Israeli government was ambivalent about the return of captured territory, especially the West Bank, which comprised the heartland of the biblical Land of Israel.

Israel immediately annexed East Jerusalem, including the Old City, along with a band of West Bank territory next to it. In the rest of the West Bank, the cabinet coalesced around a plan proposed by Yigal Allon, a former military commander: Israel would retain a band of territory between six and seven miles wide along the Jordan river, as well as strips of land on the border with Israel, and return the rest to Jordan in exchange for peace.

Israel declared that it was waiting for a phone call from King Hussein to discuss a settlement, but it never came. Instead the Arab summit in Khartoum in September 1967 issued the Three Nos: No peace with Israel, No negotiations with Israel and No recognition of Israel.